Apartheid Neglects Black Health Care

May 30, 1988|By William Raspberry, Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — When the anti-apartheid crusade hit the Stanford University campus a few years ago, it caught the school's president, Donald Kennedy, a little short. He had no sympathy for South Africa's official racism, but he also couldn't buy the protesters' notion that American disinvestment was the best way to promote the interests of apartheid's victims.

Kennedy began a search for a vehicle that would meet his objections to disinvestment without leaving him an uninvolved spectator.

He found it in MESAB (Medical Education for South African Blacks), a tax- exempt organization founded to increase the number of black health professionals in a country with far too few of them.

His subsequent investigations, he said, led him to conclude that MESAB was ''convincingly community-based, multiracial and supported by a wide range'' of black, white and colored South Africans.

He also came to understand the daunting proportions of the task MESAB has undertaken. White South Africans have one physician for every 326 people. For blacks, the ratio is one for every 3,400. There are only 20 black dentists and 70 black pharmacists for a black population of about 25 million.

One measure of those disastrous ratios is the statistic that shows infant deaths among blacks to run upward of 100 per 1,000 births. (The white infant death rate is 14 per 1,000.)

Against those numbers, the 17 black health-sciences students MESAB is supporting seem pitifully small. But Kennedy is convinced that he has taken the right path.

It isn't a question of arguing that promoting black health care is a more effective way to fight apartheid than disinvestment or economic sanctions, he says. ''The more important thing is that in any post-apartheid South African society, brought about by any means we can envision, the health-care system is going to have to do a much better job for and with and by the majority population. And that is going to require people with all sorts of training.'' But MESAB's efforts have been made more difficult by the ebbing interest in South Africa.

Yet Kennedy is determined to keep doing what he can. He says he finds inspiration in the words the late Alan Paton discovered on a tablet in an old English church:

''In the year 1652, when throughout England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, whose special praise it is to have done the best things in the worst of times, and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.''

Says Kennedy: ''We've got to find some Shirleys in this country if we are to do anything in the long range that's helpful. . . . ''